We went live with the first public version of Addresso at the start of the year, and we’re finishing the first quarter with an unprecedented way to share web3 names and addresses. Easily. Securely. Privately.

Computer science conceptualized digital identity to serve its initial market — selling its wares to governments and large organizations to manage inventories of users, employees, citizens, and customers. Computer science adopted the tenets of legal and bureaucratic identity wholesale, inclined to consider people as just another machine for lack of any imperative to think otherwise at the time. Digital identity has not been designed to rise up to the roles and operations that the vast majority...

Zooko's triangle posits that you can choose two of three properties for names / identifers, but not all three. You might say that it describes the challenge of accommodating two very different ways of 'thinking' about names — the computer way and the human way.

Friction is an important property in any system. It’s neither a good nor a bad thing out of context. Low friction is valued in the context of a car’s energy efficiency for example, and high friction is valued in bringing the exact same car to a safe stop. If Alice faces a choice between less or more friction in a digital system, between more or less convenience, you know the choice Alice is going to make. Should Alice opting for lower friction / higher convenience correspond to what’s best fo...

Trust is the willingness to be vulnerable to the actions of another party based on the expectation that the other will perform a particular action important to the person doing the trusting. This is regardless of whether the person can monitor or control the party they are trusting. Trust is a contextual quality and mechanism of human relations, of being social. There is no need to trust that 2+2 will equal 4 tomorrow, it just will. Ditto other deterministic processes such as cryptography.